From present to presentation: A philosophical critique of Hartmut Rosa’s “situational identity”

Selfhood, time, and identity—The late modern “situational self”

According to Rosa, acceleration in society has had a significant impact on the way subjects form identity and are identified by others. He defines identity as “who we are,” which “is virtually a function of our relationship to space, time, fellow human beings, and the objects of our environment (or to our action and experience)” (Rosa, 2013: 224). ⁴ As mentioned above, the internalization of acceleration is a crucial, motivating force behind the modern subject’s obsessive calculation, teleological thinking, and desire for control or domination over nature, time, and other areas of life. One major existential consequence of these attitudes can be seen in the critical role they play in the way modern people construct identity—that is, how they are worked out in relationships with others, and one’s own self-understanding. Coupled with the dynamization of external social demands, which liquefies the relatively fixed and stable roles in pre-modern times to increasingly fragmentary, choice-based, and situationally dependent options, Rosa sees a dramatic shift in the “predominant personality types or patterns of identity,” (Rosa, 2013: 224) which ultimately culminates in “situational identity.” The various patterns used are in direct correspondence to social structures, existing it what seems to be a dialectical relationship where both patterns of identity and social structures have significant influences on the other. ⁵

Rosa presents three such “patterns of identity,” the pre-modern, (classical) modern, and late or postmodern. In pre-modern times social roles were “generational”: someone was often born into a position that became the defining factor for most aspects of their life. In other scholarly works (i.e. Trilling) this is referred to as “sincerity” or a “role-based” notion of identity. Modern society provided “lifetime” roles. With the increasing flexibility in society, and a higher degree of autonomy, one was allowed to choose one’s own role. Again the role was relatively decisive in constructing one’s identity. The ability to choose or even create one’s social role is related to individualism or authenticity, which became prominent concepts in modern times. Rosa’s “late modern” classification sees a gross increase in temporization, which makes roles merely “momentary.” Here there can even be “complete situational discontinuity,” identity is fragmented, lacking a concrete space or a single unifying role; identity has only an extremely limited temporal consistency. ⁶

Many thinkers have understood pre-modern identity in ways quite similar to Rosa. Broadly speaking, GWF Hegel, Lionel Trilling, and Charles Taylor, to name a few, all find pre-modern societies as having established generational roles that serve as the social placeholders for individuals, and further provide an identity that is almost universal in its recognition by other members of that society. Drawing on Charles Taylor, Rosa calls this a “substantial a priori identity”; here one’s “predominant form of selfhood” (identity) is given rather than chosen. An externally fixed and predefined role is taken on by the subject, which provides guidelines for how to relate “to space, to time, to our fellow human beings and the objects of our environment, and to our action and experience.” (Rosa, 2013: 146) Describing Hegel’s analysis Lionel Trilling writes,

The historical process that Hegel undertakes to expound is the self-realization of Spirit through the changing relation of the individual to the external power of society … In an initial stage of the process that is being described the individual consciousness is said to be in a wholly harmonious relation to the external power of society, to the point of being identified with it. In this relation the individual consciousness renders what Hegel calls “obedient service” to the external power and feels for it an “inner reverence.” Its service is not only obedient but also silent and unreasoned, taken for granted; Hegel calls this “the heroism of dumb service.” This entire and inarticulate accord of the individual consciousness with the external power of society is said to have the attribute of “nobility”. (Trilling, 1971: 35)

As society becomes more dynamic, the once pre-determined and all-encompassing social placeholders begin to dissolve, or “liquefy.” Individuals are thus increasingly able to choose their roles, and thus the guiding force behind their identities. ⁸ Where subjects were predominately identified through what was fixed and given in pre-modern society, those living in modern societies are able to turn inward and reflexively question what is unilaterally prescribed from the outside. No longer surrendering to “the external power of society,” the identity of subjects in the modern world is characterized by an inward trajectory. Rosa refers to this as an “a posteriori identity” (Rosa, 2013: 226) and “individualization” (Rosa, 2013: 227), referencing the way one’s self-understanding, relation to others and to their environment, is formed in experience or “chosen” rather than simply given. ⁹ Charles Taylor succinctly describes this move as well, calling it “authenticity”:

[By “authenticity”] I mean the understanding of life which emerges with the Romantic expressivism of the late-eighteenth century, that each one of us has his/her own way of realizing our humanity, and that it is important to find and live out one’s own, as against surrendering to conformity with a model imposed on us from outside, by society, or the previous generation, or religious or political authority. (Taylor, 2007: 475)

Modern a posteriori identity is a comparatively “stable” form when compared to Rosa’s classification of later modern situational identity. Modern a posteriori subjects are responsible to choose (or “find”) themselves. And while the choices are not final—people do, for example, change occupations, get divorces, or switch political leanings—they are often relatively constant. Substantial revisions to the roles or communities that define a person are rare. Rosa notes, “[changes are] always possible, but remain exceptions and so constitute indexes of a failed or at least endangered identity project” (Rosa, 2013: 229). He succinctly labels the modern “identity-constituting task” of “find[ing] your own place in the world” as “a stable a posteriori identity” (Rosa, 2013: 229). For this reason Rosa sees modern identity as (at least potentially and perhaps ideally) determining a lifetime, whereas pre-modern identity was generational.

Rosa’s major contribution to philosophical discourses here is demonstrating the role time plays in the shift from sincerity to “individualization/authenticity.” While the existential element of Rosa’s argument is again in agreement with many others, including Hegel, Trilling, and Taylor, the importance of time or the “temporization of life” illuminates another dimension of this shift not often emphasized. Rosa writes, “individualization … is necessarily correlated with a temporization of life” (Rosa, 2013: 228). This is more than what Henry Rosemont and Roger Ames have argued as “living roles” through every thought, feeling, and action (Rosemont and Ames, 2009). Rosa does indeed say that “identity becomes a temporal project that unfolds in a day-to-day conduct of life” (Rosa, 2013: 228), but recognizes further complexity in the structure of identity itself. Following Martin Kohli, Rosa uses the phrase “temporization of life,” arguing that identity becomes linked with a “Bildungsroman, the coming-of-age novel or developmental narrative.” He continues,

For it presupposes, on the one hand, that the space of experience and the horizon of expectations are sufficiently different to allow one to conceive of one’s life (as well as the development of society) as a directed motion and not to have to carry on traditions in a[n] unreflective way and, on the other, that the horizon of expectations remains stable enough to allow long-run, time-resistant life perspectives to develop, the gratification of needs to be systematically postponed, and the completions of the biographical pattern to be patiently awaited. (Rosa, 2013: 230)

As society becomes increasingly accelerated it becomes correspondingly pluralistic and individuated. The expanse that a single role could cover in pre-modern or even modern times decreases respectively. Levels of coherence, stability, and predictability drop as the very notion of identity is put into question. In his Theory of Society Niklas Luhmann observes the new challenges any identity project faces in the late or post-modern world:

The transition to functional differentiation … [provoked] changes whose extent is only now apparent. As with every form of differentiation, it was left to the subsystems to regulate inclusion. But this now meant that concrete individuals could no longer be concretely placed. They had to be able to participate in all functional systems depending on the functional area in which and the code under which their communication was introduced … Individuals now had to be able to participate in all such communications and accordingly switch their couplings with functional systems from one moment to the next. (Luhmann, 2013: 20–21)

Drawing on Walter Lippmann’s metaphor of “drift” (1914) and Karl-Heinz Hörning et al’s “time-juggling player” (1997), Rosa describes this late modern space/place-less and “predicateless” self as having only “situational identity.” Somewhat similar to Moeller and D’Ambrosio’s Daoist inspired philosophy of genuine pretending, Rosa’s notion of situational identity argues for a multiplicity of selfhood. Within each new situation the subject is not only able, but also actually required to take on a disparate identity. Rosa defines,

a radically situational identity is marked out by the fact that a subject can be, say, faithful and introverted in church, “soft and feminine” in intimate relationships, chauvinistic and full of vitality at work, pacifist and counterculture at a peace demonstration, militantly aggressive and atheistic at the party convention, all without feeling the related inconsistencies as problematic. (Rosa, 2013: 240)

Niklas Luhmann defines this issue as one of “divisibility,” and sees it as necessitated in a society that offers no space/place (stable and substantial role) for the person. He writes,

The in-dividual becomes defined by divisibility. It is in need of a musical self for the opera, an ambitious self for the job, a patient self for the family. What remains for itself is the problem of identity. (Luhmann, 1993: 223)

Pre-modern and modern notions of identity and autonomy become difficult if not impossible because they are fundamentally incompatible with “the new situationality and temporalization of decisions and actions” in late modern societies (Rosa, 2013: 245). The problem thereby consists in the erosion of autonomy and disintegration of trans-situational notions of identity. Rosa cites Richard Sennett and Robert Lauer as some of the major critical voices regarding today’s “drifters” and “players.” Sennett writes, for example,

The conditions of time in the new capitalism have created a conflict between character and experience, the experience of disjointed time threatening the ability of people to form their characters into sustained narratives… Perhaps the corroding of character is an inevitable consequence. “No long term” disorients action over the long term, loosens bonds of trust and commitment, and divorces will from behavior. (Sennett in Rosa, 2013: 245)

Paradigms of identity and profilicity—Dynamic identities

In Genuine Pretending (2017) Hans-Georg Moeller and Paul D’Ambrosio discuss the general difficulty in constructing identity based on social roles. They frame this as an issue of sanity, noting the host of (impossible) relational, moral, and existential demands external roles have on one’s thoughts, emotions, behavior, and their connections. These can clearly drive someone practically, and perhaps even clinically, “insane.” ¹⁴ However, it should be noted that this concern in Genuine Pretending is not linked to contemporary society in the same way Rosa’s description is, and that Moeller and D’Ambrosio to not provide much in the way of an evaluative standard for critiquing the fragmentation of identity. ¹⁵ While they do not delve into its problematic nature, Moeller and D’Ambrosio take Lionel Trilling’s poetic expression on the inappropriateness of role-identification as extremely telling for those living in late modern societies,

We nowadays say “role” without taking thought of its original histrionic meaning: “in my professional role,” “in my paternal, or maternal, role,” even “in my masculine, or feminine, role.” But the old histrionic meaning is present whether or not we let ourselves be aware of it, and it brings with it the idea that somewhere under all the roles there is Me, that poor old ultimate actuality, who, when all the roles have been played, would like to murmur “Off, off, you lendings!” and settle down with his own original actual self. (Trilling, 1971: 9–10)

Sincerity can also be described as the “paradigm of identity” which constructs a broad understanding of self, other, and relationships (including their moral and ethical constraints) based on social roles. (Rosa and others have referred to it as predominate in pre-modern societies.) In modern societies we find the next move, the inward turn, which is not yet authenticity, but individualism. The individualism paradigm is characterized by a rejection of externally conferred identity and world understanding. The subject of individualism has an inward trajectory: looking to/for some antecedent self as the primary source of meaning and identity. Immanuel Kant takes this view, describing “a priori identity”:

We are conscious a priori of the thoroughgoing identity of ourselves with regard to all representations that can ever belong to our cognition, as a necessary condition of the possibility of all representations (since the latter represent something in me only insofar as they belong with all the others to one consciousness, hence they must at least be capable of being connected in it). (Kant, 1999 [1785]: 237)

As expressed above, the “authorship” evoked by authenticity is central. It is the idea that, as Jean-Paul Sartre famously puts it, “existence precedes essence.” One must “make” or “choose” one’s own identity, as opposed to the “finding” of individualism. Charles Taylor defines authenticity:

Authenticity (A) involves (i) creation and construction as well as discovery, (ii) originality, and frequently (iii) opposition to the rules of society and even potentially to what we recognize as morality. But it is also true, as we saw, that it (B) requires (i) openness to horizons of significance (for otherwise the creating loses the background that can save it from insignificance) and (ii) a self-definition in dialogue. That these demands may be in tension has to be allowed. But what must be wrong is a simple privileging of one over the other, of (A), say, at the expense of (B), of vice versa. (Taylor, 1992: 66)

More recently this authenticity too has fallen out of favor, and the dominant paradigm in late modern societies over the last few decades might better be expressed as “irony” or what Erving Goffman calls “cynicism.” ¹⁶ The ironic subject questions the seriousness of all previous paradigms. Richard Rorty describes the ironist:

someone who fulfills three conditions: (1) She has radical and continuing doubts about the final vocabulary she currently uses, because she has been impressed by other vocabularies, vocabularies taken as final by people or books she has encountered; (2) she realizes that arguments phrased in her present vocabulary can neither underwrite nor dissolve these doubts; (3) insofar as she philosophizes about her situation, she does not think that her vocabulary is closer to reality than others, that it is in touch with a power not herself. Ironists who are inclined to philosophize see the choice between vocabularies as made neither within a neutral and universal meta-vocabulary nor by an attempt to fight one’s way past appearances to the real, but simply by playing the new off the old. (Rorty, 1989: 73)

The increasing time spent on, and growing importance of, online profiles begets another paradigm, what I propose could be called “profilicity.” ¹⁷ This is, to borrow from Luhmann, the “second-order observation” ¹⁸ way of viewing oneself, others, and the world. Presentations of one’s life, which become constitutive for identity construction, are molded to conform to best guesses at what one thinks one’s target audience will think others think about it. In other words, the “others” (non-immediate audience or observers) indicated in second-order observation here are, to borrow loosely from Rousseau, a “generalized peer” or “general peer.” Profilicity also provides yet another answer to Rosa’s question: “Is there such a thing as a dynamization or acceleration of identity, of the relationship we have to ourselves, of our way of being (Seinsweise)?” (Rosa, 2013: 146). Heavily imbedded in complex temporal posturings, profilicity is intimately tied to the dynamization of society.

One feature of profilicity that sets it apart from sincerity, individualism, authenticity, irony, or ironic authenticity is its particular take on what Rosa refers to as a shrinking of the present. Expanding on Jean-François Lyotard in his examination of the accelerated “pace of life” Rosa writes,

if families, occupations, residences, political and religious convictions and practices can in principle be changed or switched at any time, then one no longer is a baker, husband of X, New Yorker, conservative, and Catholic per se. Rather one is so for periods of an only vaguely foreseeable duration; one is all these things “for the moment,” i.e., in a present that tends to shrink; one was something else and (possibly) will be someone else. (Rosa, 2013: 147)

Situational identity envisions a self that morphs according to the environment. What concerns profilicity is not so much the way one is engaged within particular interactions or in certain surroundings, but how this engagement is presented. Profilicity transforms the present into presentation. The temporal concerns here are with the immediate past—in terms of what has been done—but are oriented toward the future in terms of a promise made for what will be seen as having been done. It is important to note that the future envisaged here is open. Both presenter and audience already implicitly acknowledge its promises for future presentations. Speaking in Luhmannian terms, a “presentation” is information that, once it has been communicated, loses its information value and needs to be followed up by a new presentation of what has been done next.

In this sense a twofold transformation of the present into presentation can be observed. First, the emphasis in presentation is not on doing. Even in terms of what one does now, or plans to do in the future, profilicity asks that one does something to have done it; after all presentations present what has been done already. Even purchasing tickets to the Bahamas or learning Japanese is presented in terms of the purchase made, or the Japanese learned. Here we encounter an internally connected second aspect of profilicity’s transformation of the present. Presenting what has been done is largely important in terms of the promise it makes for the future. The specifics are not, however, always entirely laid bare (as opposed to actually going to the Bahamas or acquiring fluency in Japanese). In contrast to the screenshot of a flight schedule or certificate of completing three months of intensive Japanese language training, a photo of one’s super bowl party contains only a vague promise. It plainly suggests that one has lots of friends, great food, the coolest micro-brewed beer, and that everyone had a good time. Exactly what this photo means to communicate will depend on the context, but in any case it presents that an episode has taken place in a series (of super bowl parties, other celebrations, or some other category) that is open to the future and sets the tone for future presentations of a similar nature. It places itself within a narrative that does not have a fixed teleological trajectory, but rather promises more similarly exciting presentations in the future: it contributes to an eventful, dynamic, exciting profile capable of producing new presentations/information.

Profilicity operates differently from robust “narrative” conceptions of identity popularized by, for instance, by Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, or Michael Sandel, over the past few decades. As described by these philosophers, a narrative draws continuity between the past, present, and future. Importantly, narrative is something to be told, acted, or otherwise presented to an audience for their judgment. Under the conditions of second-order observation profilicity presents a narrative that seeks to be recognized not by the immediate audience as first-order observers, but by the conceptions the immediate audience has of what it thinks is presentable to others, that is, the general peer. The “identity” and value of the narrative is not tied to a “sincere” or “authentic” self behind it, but to the demonstrated capacity of the presented self to make itself presentable under such conditions.

When one’s actual life really is, as Rosa accurately describes, accelerated in many concrete arenas, coming up with a coherent narrative becomes incredibly challenging—presenting obstacles to being really “sincere,” “authentic,” or even “ironic.” Presented identity can be (almost) as colorful, multiple, and all-inclusive as one desires. One simply presents oneself as being the cool skateboarder who flips off one’s boss behind her back, as being ironic at family gatherings, and as someone who doesn’t give a shit about school. Though none may necessarily be true in terms of one’s actual emotions, attitudes, or actions, one’s presentation as essentially the “cool skateboarder” allows one to meet the variant situational demands on identity heighted in today’s dynamized society through their very celebration. And it can all be done in a day’s, or minute’s, post. More importantly, however, one can constantly re-image one’s identity. Tomorrow, or later today, or even in the next minute, one can assume a different posture, switch from party-mode to professional mode to family mode, and thereby enrich one’s profile. Profilicity is able to embrace individualism, authenticity, and irony, coupled with sincerity’s role-based aspects, in different contexts and under extreme dynamization. ¹⁹

The ability to repeatedly enhance, manipulate, or change one’s profile through updated presentations is tied to a systematic demand to do so. According to Rosa, dynamic stabilization—the idea that something can only remain stable if it grows—defines economies, technologies, culture systems, etc. as modern. An appreciation of profilicity sees a similar dynamic reaching into the realm of identity as well. Profilicity’s concern with the future coupled with the ability to constantly enhance, manipulate, or change has led to a situation where only the dynamic profile is really recognized. We call a profile “active” when it is dynamic—when it is updated or activated through participation in the broader system. In this way profilicity shows that Rosa’s cutting analysis of the dynamization of society is perhaps even more cutting then he has argued.

Conclusion

Asking, “How the system [of growth] is sustained through the subject?” Rosa says that we often feel “guilty if we don’t improve in a certain sense.” In a playful depiction Rosa says:

If maybe tomorrow night you sit at home you feel guilty, I claim, if you sit beside the fireplace or wherever. And why do you feel guilty? Benjamin Franklin would say because you should remember that time is money. Probably you say “Well no that’s not my problem”… But I would add to Benjamin Franklin that in a Neo-Liberal age you also remember that time is social relations, or social capital. And then you think “Oh it’s true there is this email by that friend, or those conference organizers, I should answer that, and I always wanted to call up this friend.” Or you remember, “Oh ya my neighbors are new maybe I should talk to them.”… So you try to increase your relationships. Maybe you say “No I’m not concerned with money or social relationships,” but then maybe you think “Maybe I should pick up with the news”. (Rosa, 2014)

As groundwork for the intercourse between Rosa’s work and the insights into identity offered by profilicity, it is, unfortunately, outside the scope of this paper to delve too much further into profilicity. Admittedly a more robust account of the other “paradigms of identity” needs to be given as well—though the first few, namely sincerity, individualism, authenticity, and irony, are already well-known and generally acknowledged. What has been made clear is that Rosa’s work opens up a new dimension, especially for philosophers, into the social and temporal factors in the development of these paradigms. Critically, however, his focus seems to be stuck largely on the paradigm of sincerity as an interpretive model for identity.

As a sociologist, and with the expressed intentions of developing a theory of society, Rosa could hardly be criticized for concentrating on the one paradigm that emphasizes the binding role of society. But investigations into identity should recognize the existence and importance of various other paradigms (which are often at work simultaneously); they are telling for how one enacts one’s roles. Just as one can be “faithful and introverted in church, ‘soft and feminine’ in intimate relationships, chauvinistic and full of vitality at work, pacifist and counterculture at a peace demonstration, militantly aggressive and atheistic at the party convention” (Rosa, 2013: 240), we can expect to find the Christian as sincere, the lover authentic, the protester an individualist, and the softball player ironic (and the Instagramer of all these demonstrates “profilicity”).

In many cases social roles are not actually primary in understanding one’s identity, its construction, or its problems. Although they are, as Erving Goffman has convincingly shown (1959), able to explain much of social life, the way they are enacted, and the problems that arise from identity today, are much more complex. People exist as a grouping of various “inconsistent” identities—both in terms of roles and, perhaps more importantly, “paradigms of identity.” To borrow from Louis Stevenson’s masterpiece The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, today we might also “hazard the guess that man will be ultimately known for a mere polity of multifarious, incongruous and independent denizens” (Stevenson, 1991 [1886]: 43). We are denizens not only of various roles, but also of the paradigms that inform our identification with, or detachment from, these roles. Rosa’s major contribution here is in detailing the importance of temporality and the way social acceleration has favored certain paradigms. A richer investigation of identity in late modern society would include both an account of social acceleration as well as the recognition of its disparate paradigms.